Composer/cellist Clarice Jensen and composer/multi-instrumentalist Chuck Johnson team up for a shared bill, performing separately and in a brand new collaboration.

In the spring of 2026 Chuck Johnson will be presenting live renditions of a new work titled Caoineadh. This series of performances and live mixes shared online seeks new pathways into composition and improvisation and draws from DJ techniques, wordless voices, voiceless laments, and pulses suggested by negative spaces.

Performing on cello with effects pedals, Clarice Jensen presents music from her acclaimed new album, In holiday clothing, out of the great darkness. Her fourth full length album, it was released on FatCat/130701 Records in October 2025, and draws abstract inspiration from the Suites of JS Bach, placing the rich sonority of the cello at the fore but carefully treating and layering the timbres to create a "kaleidoscopic, surging cathedral of sound" as described by NPR's Tom Huizenga.

Hand on the Bay is a new collaborative project for Jensen and Johnson. The work is organized by a graphic score that renders the harmonic material of 16 bars of Willie Nelson's Red Headed Stranger over the course of 24 ambient minutes.

TROY LISTENING ROOM
7:00 PM - doors open
7:30 PM - music starts

PLEASE NOTE: the venue address will be provided in the confirmation email sent to all ticket-buyers. We are located in South Troy, NY, a few blocks south of the canal. If you have any questions about the location or event before purchasing tickets, please contact us at sspresents518@gmail.com.

* All ages welcome
* BYO (feel free to bring your own drinks/snacks)
* This venue is not ADA accessible and requires walking up a short flight of stairs to enter
* Tickets are sliding-scale. Please select the price tier that you feel most comfortable with.

Clarice Jensen

Clarice Jensen is a composer and cellist based in New York who graduated with a BM and MM from the Juilliard School. As a solo artist, Jensen has developed a distinctive compositional approach, improvising and layering her cello through shifting loops and a chain of electronic effects to open out and explore a series of rich, drone-based sound fields. Pulsing, visceral and full of color, her work is deeply immersive, marked by a wonderful sense of restraint and an almost hallucinatory clarity. Meditative yet with a sculptural sharpness and rigor that sets it apart from the swathe of New Age / DIY droners, she has forged a very elegant and precise vision.

Her music has been described by Self-Titled as “heavily processed, incredibly powerful neo-classical pieces that seem to come straight from another astral plane”; by Boomkat as “languorously void-touching ideas, scaling and sustaining a sublime tension”; whilst Bandcamp remarked upon “a kaleidoscope of pulsing movement rich in acoustic beating and charged with other psychoacoustic effects, constantly shifting in density and viscous timbre.”

Jensen’s striking debut album For This From That Will Be Filled was released in April 2018 on the Berlin-based label Miasmah and followed in September 2019 with the "Drone Studies" EP, a cassette release via Geographic North. Signing to FatCat’s 130701 imprint (Max Richter, Jóhann Jóhannsson, Hauschka, Dustin O’Halloran, etc.) in late summer 2019, her sophomore album The experience of repetition as death was released April 2020. Naming it among the top 50 albums of 2020, NPR remarked "This collection of requiems for a dying mother ranks among the great ambient albums of the 21st century." Her latest album Esthesis was released in October 2022 and NPR ranked it among the Best Experimental Albums of the Year. Boomkat stated, “Jensen finds a fine line between in-the-moment, tactile precision and lingering hallucinatory afterimages that emerge from her improv/compositional system. The pieces betray an exquisite depth of feeling in Jensen’s diffractive rendering of shimmering layers and gently transitory movements,” with Magnetic Magazine reporting, “There is no doubt this album will impact people profoundly.” Her next album, In holiday clothing, out of the great darkness, will be released on FatCat’s 130701 imprint on October 17, 2025. Jensen recorded it as part of the Visiting Artist Programme at Studio Richter Mahr, the creative space co-founded by Yulia Mahr and Max Richter in Oxfordshire, England.

Clarice Jensen’s music is a natural fit for film and she is increasingly in demand as a film and television composer. Her recent scores include Amber Sealey's No Man of God starring Elijah Wood which premiered at the 2021 Tribeca Film Festival; Takeshi Fukunaga's Ainu Mosir, which premiered at the 2020 Tribeca Film Festival; Fernanda Valadez's 2020 Sundance Film Festival award-winner Sin Señas Particulares (Identifying Features), for which Jensen was nominated for a 2021 Ariel Award for Best Original Music by the Mexican Academy of Cinematographic Arts and Sciences; Caught in the Web: The Murders Behind Zona Divas (2024), a four-part Netflix documentary on femicide in Mexico from Astrid Rondero and Fernanda Valadez; and A Want in Her, a documentary film from Myrid Carten which premiered at International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) in 2024. Jensen is currently at work on several new film and television projects, as well as her next album.

A versatile collaborator, Jensen has recorded and performed with a host of stellar artists including Jóhann Jóhannsson, Max Richter, Björk, Stars of the Lid, Dustin O’Halloran, Nico Muhly, Taylor Swift, Michael Stipe, the National and many others. In her role as the artistic director of ACME (the American Contemporary Music Ensemble), she has helped bring to life some of the most revered works of modern classical music, including pieces by Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, Gavin Bryars, and more. Jensen recently composed an evening-length work for ACME, The Exaltation of Inanna, for string quartet, guitar, and six singers. The piece is based on the writings of the first author known by name, Enheduanna (2300 BC), and was premiered at The Morgan Library and Museum in New York.

Chuck Johnson

Chuck Johnson is a California-based composer, producer, and musician. He approaches his work with an ear towards finding faults and instabilities that might reveal latent beauty, with a focus on pedal steel guitar, experimental electronics, alternate tuning systems, and composing for film and television. Recordings of his work have been published by Western Vinyl, VDSQ, Thrill Jockey, Temporary Residence, Kompakt, Ghostly, and Three Lobed, among others.

Between 2011 and 2015 Johnson released a triptych of solo guitar LP’s – A Struggle Not A Thought, Crows in the Basilica, and Blood Moon Boulder – that have become touchstones of 21st Century acoustic guitar. Balsams, his first album to platform pedal steel guitar, was described by Pitchfork as “singular,” and “a mournful hymn built out of layers of sliding strings, cascading with a zenlike stateliness…” In 2019 he collaborated with Marielle V. Jakobsons to release their debut LP as Saariselka for Temporary Residence Ltd. The follow-up to Johnson’s acclaimed Balsams LP, The Cinder Grove delves further into the compositional possibilities of the pedal steel guitar in the context of chamber ensemble arrangements for strings, organ, and piano.

On his latest album Sun Glories, Johnson explores themes of time, memory, and illusion through his unique blend of pedal steel, synths, organs, strings, and drums. Pitchfork wrote about the album “A lot of ambient artists are embracing the pedal steel right now, but none are quite as willing to jettison the instrument’s readymade associations as Johnson.” And All Music Guide wrote “Sun Glories is a magnificent record displaying Johnson’s mastery of multiple instruments and techniques.”

Johnson’s credits as a film composer include scores for the HBO series Burden of Proof and the popular PBS shows Somewhere South and A Chef’s Life. In 2009 he received an MFA in Electronic Music and Intermedia Art from Mills College, where he studied composition and electronic music with Pauline Oliveros, Maggi Payne, Chris Brown, John Bischoff, Laetita Sonami, and James Fei.

His work as a mixing and mastering engineer includes releases by Room40 records, No Quarter, Three Lobed Recordings, Temporary Residence, Bill Orcutt, Allison Russell, Nathan Salsburg, claire rousay, Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Daniel Bachman, Body/Head, and more.